Infrastructure

It was a cool day in Dallas last November, when a small quadcopter lifted itself off the ground of an American Airlines hangar and buzzed towards a Boeing 777. The drone, a DJI Mavic Enterprise, had been outfitted with a spotlight, but otherwise looked a lot like what you might see your neighbour flying in the backyard. The remarkable difference was that this particular aircraft had been programmed to inspect the hull of the much larger aircraft, the jet. It could do in a matter of minutes what it would take a maintenance crew hours to do. It was, in its own way, a tiny flying robot with a job. Read More >>

Boris Johnson is not a details-oriented politician. He's a man with a vision - and no matter how stupid that vision is, he has form for making it a reality: You only have to look at London's stupid cable car, or the super expensive new buses that actually reduce capacity compared to the bendy buses that came before, to see that. (And if you think the cable car is good, then I have a garden bridge to sell you.) Read More >>

If you’ve ridden the New York City subway, you know the feeling. You buy a flimsy plastic card that lets you ride the train, and when you try to swipe it at the turnstile, it doesn’t work. You swipe again. The machine asks you to swipe again. You swipe again. The machine asks you to swipe again at the same turnstile. This can go on for hours, until you beg an MTA employee to let you through. That’s the cursed MetroCard experience, and as of last week, its days are numbered. Read More >>

On Tuesday, The New York Times decided to reignite the age old debate of walking versus standing on escalators. And do you know what the paper concluded? “You shouldn’t walk on escalators.” This is a patently incorrect and essentially silly conclusion for at least four reasons. Read More >>

Midtown Manhattan — with its noise, traffic, slow-moving tourists, and overpriced everything — is the one place most New Yorkers avoid at all costs (if they can help it). It’s also home to Trump Tower, a gargantuan gold-plated phallus jabbed straight into the city skyline where the President-elect is planning on spending weekends during his term in office. Read More >>

The above image just looks like a subway train, doing exactly the thing trains do. But this is no ordinary train—it’s the first glimpse at an infrastructure project first proposed almost a century ago. Read More >>

The National Audit Office (NAO) has revealed that it still needs to work out whether or not the £4 billion super sewer that’s set to be built beneath London won’t actually, you know, flood the Underground transport network with shit and screw with the foundations of Elizabeth Tower. Read More >>

In May 2013, a bridge spanning the Skagit River along Interstate 5 in Washington state catastrophically collapsed, after an oversized trailer clipped one of the bridge’s cross beams. A new analysis by engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign confirms the many factors that contributed to the collapse, and offers recommendations for how to prevent similar failures in the future. Read More >>

Earlier this week a subway station in Washington DC turned into a surprise water park ride. It wasn’t a huge deal — the station was closed for a few hours, the water drained, and service went back to normal — but it certainly looked like it. Seeing a timelapse of the whole thing from the station’s entrance shows how this happened. Read More >>

Cities could exclusively use rainwater to flush their toilets. But by demanding drinkable water to be pumped to their houses, just so they can crap in it and throw it back out, they are burdening their infrastructure in two different ways. Read More >>

California’s high-speed train has just been delayed by three more years. The first leg of the state’s high-speed rail is now set to finish by 2025, not 2022 as planned. This could mean that Hyperloop—the Golden State’s other, even more futuristic transit plan—could beat the bullet train to the station. Read More >>

Rivers have long been a centre of human activity, but as the global population booms, our impact on these systems is becoming too much to bear. In fact, two-thirds of the 33 largest river deltas on Earth are sinking — some of them at a staggering rate. Read More >>